The Seven Sacred Truths

~Love is Divine Power~

The Fourth Chakra

Internal Power

Level Four

Emotional Power

 The fourth chakra is the central power house of the human energy system.  The middle chakra, it mediates between the body and spirit and determines their health and strength.  Fourth chakra energy is emotional in nature and helps propel our emotional development. This chakra embodies the spiritual lesson that teaches us how to act out of love and compassion and recognise that the most powerful energy we have is love.

Sacred Truth of the Fourth Chakra

The fourth chakra is the power centre of the human energy system because ~Love is Divine Power~. While intelligence or ~mental energy~ is generally considered superior to emotional energy, actually emotional energy is the true motivator of the human body and spirit.  Love in its purest form - unconditional love - is the substance of the Divine, with its endless capacity to forgive us and respond to our prayers. Our own hearts are designed to express beauty, compassion, forgiveness and love. It is against our spiritual nature to act others.

Location

Centre of the chest - Heart

Energy Connection to the Emotional/mental Body

This chakra resonates to our emotional perceptions, which determine the quality of our lives far more than our mental perceptions. As children we react to our circumstances with a range of emotions; love, passion, confidence, hope, despair, hate, envy and fear. As adults we are challenged to generate within ourselves an emotional climate and steadiness from which to act consciously and with compassion.

Symbolic/perceptual Connection

More than any other chakra, the fourth represents our capacity to ~Let go and let ~God~. With its energy we accept our personal emotional challenges as extensions of a Divine Plan, which has as its intent our conscious evolution. By releasing our emotional pain, by letting go of our need to know why things have happened as they have, we reach a state of tranquillity. In order to achieve that inner peace, however, we have to embrace the healing energy of forgiveness and release our lesser need for human, self determined justice.

Primary Strengths

Love, forgiveness, compassion, dedication, inspiration, hope, trust and the ability to heal oneself and others.

Primary Fears

Fears of Loneliness, commitment, and "following ones heart"; fear of inability to protect oneself emotionally, fear of emotional weakness and betrayal. Loss of fourth chakra energy can give rise to jealousy, bitterness, anger, hatred, and an inability to forgive others as well as oneself.

The challenge inherent in the fourth chakra is similar to that of the third but is more spiritually sophisticated. While the third chakra’s focus is on our feelings about ourselves in relation to our physical world, the fourth chakra focuses on our feelings about our internal world - our emotional response to our own thoughts, ideas, attitudes and inspiration, as well as the attention we give to our emotional needs. This level of commitment is ~the~ essential factor in forming healthy relationships with others.

We are not born fluent in love but spend our life learning about it. Its energy is pure power. We are as attracted to love as we are intimidated by it. We are motivated by love, controlled by it, inspired by it, healed by it, and destroyed by it. Love is the fuel of our physical and spiritual bodies. Each of life’s challenges is a lesson in some aspect of love.

Learning the Power of Love

Because love has such power, we come to know this energy in stages. Each stages represents a lesson in love’s intensity and forms; forgiveness, compassion, generosity, kindness, caring for oneself and others. The stages follow the design of our chakras: we begin learning love within our tribe, absorbing the many expressions of its energy from our family members. Tribal love can be unconditional, but it generally communicates the expectation of loyalty and tribal support; in the tribal setting, love is an energy that is shared among one’s own kind.

As the second chakra awakens and we learn the bonds of friendship, love grows to include "outsiders". We express love through sharing with and caring for others to whom we are not connected through blood. And as our third chakra awakens we discover love of external things, of our personal, physical and material needs, which may include athletics, academics, fashion, dating and mating, occupation and home, and body.

All three of these chakras involve love in the external world. At one time in our civilisation, these three practices of love were all that life required. Very few people needed more than tribal and partnership love. With the advent of the spiritual movement, however, love is becoming recognised as a force that influences and perhaps determines biological activity. Love helps us to heal others and ourselves.

Life crises that have issues of love at their core, divorce, death of a loved one, emotional abuse, abandonment, adultery are often the cause of an illness, and not just an event that coincidentally precedes it. Physical healing often requires, and may demand, the healing of emotional issues.

Loving Oneself as the Path to the Divine

The expression "If you can’t love yourself, you can’t love anyone else" is commonplace. Yet for many people loving oneself remains a vague notion, which we often act out in material ways, through shopping sprees and outrageous vacations. But rewarding oneself with trips and toys is third chakra love - using physical pleasure to express self appreciation. While this type of reward is enjoyable, it can obstruct our contact with the deeper emotional stirrings of the heart that emerge when we need to evaluate a relationships, or a job, or some other troubled circumstance that affects our well-being. Loving oneself as a fourth chakra challenge means having the courage to listen to the hearts emotional messages and spiritual directives. The archetype to which the heart most frequently guises us for healing is that of the ~wounded child~

The "wounded child" within each of us contains the damaged or stunted emotional patterns of our youth, patterns of painful memories, negative attitudes, and of dysfunctional self images. Unknowingly, we may continue to operate within these patterns as adults, albeit in a new form. Fear of abandonment, for example, becomes jealousy. Sexual abuse becomes disfunctional sexuality, often causing a repetition of the same violations with our own children. A child’s negative self image can later become the source of such dysfunctions such as anorexia, obesity, alcoholism, and other addictions as well as obsessive fear of failure. These patterns can damage our emotional relationships, our personal and professional lives, and our health. Loving oneself begins with confronting this archetypal force within the psyche and unseating the wounded child’s authority over us. If unhealed, wounds keep us in the past.

Healing is possible through acts of forgiveness. In the Christian philosophy, through the life and teachings of Jesus, forgiveness is a spiritual act of perfection, but it is also a physically healing act. Forgiveness is no longer merely an option for a necessity for healing. Jesus always healed his patients emotional sufferings; the physical healing then followed naturally. Whilst Jesus’ healings have been interpreted by many theologians and Sunday school teachers as a Divine reward for the recipients confession of misbehaviour, forgiveness is an essential spiritual act that must occur in order to open oneself fully to the healing power of love. Self love means caring for ourselves enough to forgive people in our past so that the wounds can no longer damage us - for our wounds do not hurt the people who hurt us, they hurt only us. Releasing our attachment to these wounds enables us to move from the childlike relationship with the Divine of the first three chakras into one in which we participate with the Divine in acting out of the love and compassion of the fourth chakra.

The fourth chakra energies propel us further into spiritual maturity, beyond a parent-child dialogue with the Divine, beyond praying for explanations for events, beyond fearing the unexpected. The wounded child sees the Divine as operating a reward and punishment system with humanly logical explanations for all painful experiences. The wounded child does not understand that within all experiences, no matter how painful, lie spiritual insights. So long as we think like a wounded child, we will love conditionally and with great fear of loss.

Our culture as a whole is evolving toward healing from its emphasis on wounds and victimisation. Having entered into the power of our wounds, however, it is difficult to see how we let go of this negative power and move head to become ~unwounded~ and self empowered. Ours is a ~fourth chakra culture~ that has not yet moved out of our wounds and into spiritual adulthood.

Awakening the Conscious Self

We get out of the fourth chakra by going through it and learning its lessons. When we enter the interior of our own hearts, we leave behind the familiar thought patterns of the lower three chakras and particularly our tribal heart. We are released from the protection of habitual definitions such as "My priority is the needs of my family", or "I can’t change jobs because my wife needs to feel secure" - and we are greeted at our hearts doorway with only one question: "What about me?"

That question is an invocation, drawing to ourselves years of repressed but well recorded emotional data that, in an instant, can determine a new path for ourselves. We may attempt to run back into the protection of the tribal mind, but its capacity to comfort us is now gone.

We begin the formidable task of getting to know ourselves by discovering our emotional nature - not in relation to anyone or anything, but in relation to ourselves alone. With or without anyone else playing a primary role, a person needs to know:

What do I like?

What do I love?

What makes me happy?

What do I need for balance?

What are my strengths?

Can I rely upon myself?

What are my weaknesses?

Why do I do the things I do?

What makes me need to attention and approval of others?

Am I strong enough to be close to another person and still honour my own emotional needs?

These questions are different from those of the tribal mind, which teaches us to ask: What do I like ~in relation to others?~ How strong can I be while still remaining attractive ~to~ others? What do I need ~from others~ in order to be happy? What will I have to change about myself in order to get ~someone to love~ me?

We don’t easily pursue these questions of self-exploration because we know the answers will require us to change our lives. Prior to the 1960’s this kind of self examination was the domain of only the more peripheral members of society - the mystics, the artists, philosophers, and other another creative geniuses. Meeting the ~self~ activates the transformation of human consciousness and the consequences for many artists and mystics have included dramatic episodes of depression, despair, hallucination, visions, suicide attempts and uncontrollable emotional turmoil, as well as heightened started of ecstasy combined in both physical and spiritual manifestations. It was commonly believed that the price of spiritual awakening was too high and too risky for most people and was meant only for a ~gifted~ few.

Yet the revolutionary energy of the 1960’s led millions of people to chant ~what about me~ and thereafter the human consciousness movement drove our culture through the archetypal doorway of the fourth chakra. It unearthed the secrets of our hearts and articulated details of our wounded childhood that still shape much of our adult personalities.

Not surprisingly, our fourth chakra culture has seen national increases in divorce. The opening of the fourth chakra has transformed the archetype of marriage into the archetype of partnership. As a result most contemporary marriages require a strong sense of ~self~ for success, rather than the abdication of ~self~ that was required in traditional marriages. The symbolic meaning of marriage is that one must be in union with one’s own personality and spirit first. After one has a clear understanding of oneself, one can create a successful intimate partnership. The increase in divorce is therefore rooted directly in the opening of the fourth chakra, which draws people into self discovery for the first time. Many people ascribe the breakdown of their marriage to the fact that their spouse has given them no support for their emotional, psychological and intellectual needs, and as a result they had to seek out a true partnership.

The opening of the fourth chakra has also changed our consciousness about health, healing and the causes of illness. Whereas disease was once thought of as caused by essentially lower chakra sources, genetics and germs, we now also have expanded this concept to include the origin of disease also as stemming from toxic emotional stress levels. Healing begins with the repair of emotional injuries. Our entire medical model is being reshaped around the power of the heart and the shift in thinking on the causes of heart attacks etc.

Moving Beyond the Language of Wounds

As a fourth chakra culture we have language of intimacy that is now based upon wounds. Before the 1960’s acceptable conversation consisted mainly of the exchange of information about 1^st, 2^nd and 3^rd chakra issues, names, places of origin, work, and hobbies. Rarely would someone reveal the details of his or her sexual desires of the depths of his or her psychological or emotional torment. Our culture was not yet comfortable with this level of discussion, and we lacked the vocabulary for it.

Since becoming a fourth chakra culture, however, we have become therapeutically fluent, the process creating a new language of intimacy which one could call ~woundology~. We now use the revelation and exchange of our wounds as the substance of conversation, indeed as the glue that binds a relationship. We have become so good at this, in fact, that we have converted our wounds into a type of ~relationship currency~ that we use in order to control situations and people. The countless support groups for helping people work through their histories of abuse, addiction, battering, to name a few, serve only to enhance woundology as our contemporary language of intimacy/ Within the setting of these well meaning support groups, members receive, often for the first time, much needed validation for the injury they have endured. The outpouring of compassion from attentive group members feels like a long, cold drink of water on a hot, dry day.

Wounds as a language of intimacy have found an arena of expression within relationships as well as in healing support groups. In fact it is no exaggeration to say that some of our contemporary romantically bonding rituals practically ~required~ a wound for "lift-off". A typical bonding ritual looks something like this… two people meet for the first time. They exchange names, hometowns, and possibly some reference to ethnic or religious origins (first chakra data). Next the conversation moves to second chakra topics: occupations, relationship histories, including marriage, divorces, and children, and perhaps finances. Third chakra sharing comes next, usually in terms of personal preferences in eating habits, exercise, schedules, off-hour activities and possibly personal growth problems. Should they want to establish an intimate connection, they move on to the fourth chakra. One person reveals a wound that he or she is still "processing". Should the other person want to respond in a ~bonding~ manner, that person will match the wound with something of the same magnitude. If a match is produced, they have become ~wound mates~. Their union will include the following unspoken terms of agreement.

"We will be there to support each other through any difficult memories associated with this wound. That support will include reorganising any part of our social life, or even work life, around the needs of our wounded partner. If required, we will carry our wounded partner’s responsibilities as a way of showing how sincere we are in our support. We will always encourage our partner to process his or her wounds with us and to take as much time as necessary for recovery. We will accept, with minimal friction, all weakness and shortcomings rooted in wounds, since acceptance is crucial to healing."

In short, a bond based upon wound intimacy is an implicit guarantee that weakened partners will always need each other and that we will have forever open passage to each others interior. In terms of communication, such bonds represent an entirely new dimension of love, one that is oriented towards therapeutic support and the nurturing of mutual commitments to healing. In terms of power, partners have never had such easy access to each others vulnerabilities or so much open acceptance for using wounds to order and control our close relationships. ~woundology~ has completely redefined the parameters of intimacy.

Wounded intimacy has found enormous support within the holistic healing community, particular in the literature on the links between emotional pain and illness and between healing emotional traumas and the recovery of health. Support groups have been created around every possible type of emotional trauma from incest to child abuse to domestic violence to grief. Television talk shows thrive on making public the details of peoples wounds. (Not only do we live within our wounds these days, we are entertained by the wounds of others.). The legal system has learned how to convert wounds into economic power, people are encouraged to consider law suits as a way of copying with their injuries.

Whilst the original intention of these support groups was to help people experience a nurturing compassionate response to a personal crisis, no-one expected them to continue until the person was healed from the crisis. They were intended to simply be a boat across a river of transition.

Yet many members of these groups have not wanted to get off the lifeboat when they reached the opposite shore. Instead they have made a transitional phase of their lives into their full time lifestyle. Once they learned to speak woundology it became extremely difficult for them to give up the privileges that accompany being wounded in our fourth chakra culture.

Without a schedule for healing, we risk being addicted to what we think of as support and compassion; we find ourselves believing we need more and more time to ~process~ our wounds. Because the supportive response feel so long overdue, support group members frequently hold onto it with a passion that suggests, "I’m never leaving here, because this is the only place where I have ever found support. There is no support for me in my ordinary world. I will therefore live ~in process~ and among people who understand what I have been through.

The problem with such support systems is the difficulty of telling someone that he or she has had enough support and needs to get on with the business of living. In many ways, this problem reflects our skewed understanding of compassion. Compassion, a fourth chakra emotion and one of the spiritual energies contained in the fourth chakra. It is the strength to honour another’s suffering while bring power back into ones life. Because our culture for so long did not allow time for healing the heart or even recognising the need for it, we have overcompensated for this earlier failing by now failing to place any time boundaries around that healing. We have yet to create a model of healthy intimacy that is empowered yet still vulnerable. At present, we define ~healed~ as the opposite of ~needy~. Therefore to be healed means to be fully contained, always positive, always happy, always sure of oneself, and never needing anyone.

The Path to the Empowered Heart

Healing is simple, but it is not easy. The steps are few yet they demand great effort.

Commit yourself to healing all the way to the source of the pain. This means turning inwards and coming to know your wounds.

Once inside, identify your wounds. Have they become a form or ~wound power~ within your present life? if you have converted your wounds into power, confront why you might fear healing. As you identify your wounds, have someone witness them and their influence to your development.

Once you have verbalised/affirmed your wounds..observe how you use them to influence or even control the people around you as well as yourself. As you observe yourself during the day, note your choice of vocabulary, then formulate new patterns of interaction with others that do not rely upon wound power. Recognise that it is often far more difficult to release the power you derive from your wound than it is to release the memory of the painful experience. A person who cannot let go of wound power is a wound addict, and like all addictions, wound addiction is not easy to break. Don’t be afraid to seek therapeutic help in getting through this step.

Identify the good that can and has come from your wounds. Start living within the consciousness of appreciation and gratitude, and if you have to ~fake it til you make it~.. or ~talk the walk~. Initiate a spiritual practice and stick to it. Do not be casual about your spiritual discipline.

Once you have established a consciousness of appreciation, you can take on the challenge of forgiveness. As appealing as forgiveness is in theory, it is an extremely unattractive personal action for most people, mainly because the true nature of forgiveness remains misunderstood. Forgiveness is not the same as telling the person who harmed you "It’s OK" which is more or less the way most people view it. Rather, forgiveness is a complex act of consciousness, one that liberates the soul and psyche from the need for personal vengeance and the perception of oneself as a victim. More than releasing from blame the people who caused our wounds, forgiveness means releasing the control that the perception of victimhood has over our psyches. The liberation that forgiveness generates comes in the transition to a higher state of consciousness - not just in theory but energetically and biologically. In fact, the consequence of a genuine act of forgiveness borders on the miraculous. It may contain the energy that generates miracles themselves.

Evaluate what you need to do in order to forgive others - and yourself if necessary. Should you need to contact anyone for a closure discussion, make sure that you are not carrying the message of blame as a private agenda. If you are, you are genuinely not ready to let go and move on. Should you need to share your closure thoughts in a letter to the person, do so, but again make sure your intention is to retrieve your spirit from yesterday, not to send yet another message of anger.

Finally, create an official ceremony for yourself in which you call your spirit back from your past and release the negative influence of all your wounds. Whether you prefer a ritual or a private prayer service, enact your message of forgiveness in an ~official~ way in order to establish a new beginning.

Think Love. Live in appreciation and gratitude. Invite change into your life, if only through your attitude. And remind yourself continually of the message of all spiritual masters worth their salt, keep your spirit in the present time. In the language of Jesus "Leave the dead and get on with your life"..and as Buddha taught "there is only Now".

The curious thing about healing is that depending upon who you talk to, you can come to believe either that nothing is easier or that nothing is more complicated.

The fourth chakra is the centre of the human energy system. Everything in and about our lives runs of the fuel of our hearts. We will all have experiences mean to "break our hearts" - not in half but wide open. Regardless of how your heart is broken, your choice is always the same: What will you do with your pain? Will you use it as an excuse to give fear more authority over you, or can you release the authority of the physical world over you through an act of forgiveness? The question contained within the fourth chakra will be presented to you again and again in your life, until the answer you give becomes your own liberation.

The energies of the fourth chakra continually direct us to discover and love ourselves. This love is the essential key to finding the happiness that we are convinced lies outside ourselves but that spiritual texts remind us is only found within. Too many people are frightened of knowing ourselves, convinced that self knowledge would mean living alone, without their current friends and partners. Whilst the short term effects of self knowledge may well cause changes, its long term development fuelled by consciousness not fear, will be more fulfilling. It makes no sense to seek to become intuitively conscious, then work to keep that consciousness from upsetting our lives. The only path towards spiritual consciousness is through the heart. That truth is not negotiable, no matter what spiritual tradition one chooses as a means to know the divine, and the truth

~Love is Divine Power~

and so we move to the next Chakra

~The Power of Will~

found within